It’s a scene that’s become so familiar that it almost seems a tired trope. Tap tap. “It’s the police, and we’re here to talk about your tweets.” It feels out of place in 2025 when the grip of wokeness on politics and public life appears to have loosened. And yet here it is again, reminding us that our institutions remain perilously captured.
“Our institutions remain perilously captured.”
This time, though, the script was slightly different. Instead of an officer or two at a suburban door, there were five, and they were all waiting for sitcom writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport, where he was promptly arrested on arrival from America. The kind of reception one imagines reserved for drug traffickers or terrorists was extended to a man whose crime was, apparently, being mean on the internet.
Linehan was informed that his grave offense consisted of three posts on X, including one where he suggested that if all else failed, women should defend themselves by punching trans-identified men “in the balls.” Crass, sure. But hardly warranting a team prepped for an organized crime raid. For this, he was interrogated until the stress caused a medical event. Fittingly, he was then checked over by a nurse, like the infectious virus the state believes him to be, and bailed on the condition of quiet quarantine: no more X.
The police seem to have missed a clear opportunity for spectacle. They could have paraded Linehan through arrivals in cuffs. Instead, they arranged for a van to meet him on the tarmac. Yet this is completely fitting for the kind of governance that arrests like this represent. They are concerned with public health rather than crime and punishment. Although he was arrested, Linehan was treated like a patient rather than a criminal, warned to keep away from others to avoid spreading the disease.
It is clearly absurd that the police expended so many resources to arrest a comedian when shoplifting is all but decriminalized and rapists and pedophiles are considered for early release to reduce strain on the prison system. But as I’ve touched on elsewhere in Compact, this is exactly what one should expect given how our institutions have increasingly come to view crime and policing.
For decades now, the governing mantra has been borrowed not from liberal governance but from public health: Prevention is better than cure. Theft and actual violence are not where institutions step in, but are instead signs that they have already failed. By the time someone commits a crime, it is too late. From this perspective, Linehan committed the perfect crime: not because it was undetectable, but because it allowed police to exercise their powers of prevention.
Modern health regimes have long embodied this logic. Curative medicine is increasingly seen as a costly lost cause. Instead, nearly every aspect of life has been recast as just so many “risk factors” to be monitored and adjusted, transforming citizens into permanent patients. So too for policing, where every thought, feeling, and experience becomes a risk factor for criminality. In fact, healthcare and policing often directly overlap. A recent job ad in Britain’s National Health Service sought out a “liaison and diversion officer” who would be tasked with identifying people at risk of offending and intervening before any crime occurs.
Just as public health officials seem increasingly exasperated at the need to treat illness rather than hectoring populations about how they should live so that they do not fall ill, police have become much more comfortable hectoring populations about how they should think so that crime never happens. Tweets can be policed like cigarettes or salt intake: warning labels, bans, nudges, and the occasional confiscation.
In this model, schools, hospitals, courts, and especially police departments are seen as ideally regulatory bodies rather than institutions that actually do something in the world. From this perspective, police don't want to be out fighting crime or criminals (that's way too costly and dangerous). Instead, they should be dispensing advice and policing speech and behavior. It’s a bit like proper handwashing. Get the guidance right, and crime, like disease, will take care of itself.
This overlap is nothing new. Early 20th-century advocates of “social hygiene” argued that if society managed invalids, “idiots,” and other undesirables with proper “prophylactic” measures, prisons would become largely unnecessary. The language has changed, but the impulse remains the same: Identify a class of people whose words or existence are seen as dangerous precursors to disorder, and manage them in advance. The trouble, as British sociologist Nikolas Rose put it, was: “How was the feeble-minded individual to be identified for special treatment?” Education provided the answer, where you could not only identify the enfeebled but re-educate them too. When that fails, a knock at the door, or indeed an airport arrest, might just have to do.
This explains why Linehan’s post prompted an anti-terrorism style confrontation, while the similar phrase “punch a TERF,” so popular among militant trans activists it’s become a near slogan, rarely attracts the same heavy-handed response. “Punch a TERF” springs from the mouths of activists who are otherwise aligned with institutions. They are demanding adherence to speech and behavioral codes sanctioned from above—codes that will ostensibly create good harmonious citizens and societies if only people can be made to believe in them. Linehan called the police their “personal goon squad.” But in truth, the activists are the state’s own goon squad in drag: an extension of its power, so they can mostly do as they please.
It is tempting to imagine that the solution is simply rooting out trans ideology from institutions. After all, whole bureaucracies and career paths have been built around the unquestionable status of that ideology as a moral compass. Simply take a DOGE-style weed whacker to those institutions and all will be well. But this is the easy answer. The harder one is that the ideology, and the aggressive thought- and speech-policing that comes with it, are symptoms of a broader logic of governance. When the rainbow placards disappear, something else will be waiting to enforce compliance.
Linehan’s arrest shows just how deeply woke ideology is embedded in institutions long after it elsewhere appears passé. But more importantly, it shows that supposed malefactors are no longer treated as citizens who have broken the law, but as contaminants to be isolated and neutralized. If our institutions continue to see prevention as their highest calling, we will continue to see our thoughts policed long after woke is gone.